The director, the dictator and the world's worst action film

Paul Fischer27 February 2015 • 7:30am

Your producer is Kim Jong-il and he's just thrown your leading man in jail: how to make a movie in North Korea

Ferdinando Baldi had made every sort of quick, cheap picture in the book. He’d made sword-and-sandal epics and cheesy spaghetti westerns. He’d written, directed and produced; he’d worked with everyone from Orson Welles to Mario Bava. In fact, in the course of his 35-year career, Baldi was pretty sure he’d seen it all.

He was proven wrong in the spring of 1986, on the day that Kim Jong-il, Comrade Dear Leader from North Korea, came to him with a film offer.

Baldi had entered the film business in the early 1950s, first in the employ of other filmmakers but quickly making a name for himself as a hard-working, versatile director of exploitation B-movies. His career reached a weird, wonderful peak in the 1960s, during which he directed Orson Welles as King Saul in David & Goliath; made one of the early instalments in the Django western franchise, later to be rebooted by Quentin Tarantino; and even managed to cast Ringo Starr in a western about a blind cowboy and his seeing-eye horse roaming the West looking for the 50 mail-order brides he was due to deliver to a mining settlement. (Ringo plays one of the villain’s henchmen, a nasty Mexican bandit).

When peplums and spaghetti westerns went out of favour Baldi reinvented himself as a maker of slasher horror films. The pictures weren’t always very good - in fact Baldi more often than not worked under a pseudonym, usually Ferdy Baldwin or Ted Kaplan - but they were daring and effective.

By the late 1980s, however, Baldi’s career had stalled. In the US, young guns named Steven Spielberg and George Lucas had taken B-movie premises (killer shark terrorises holidaymakers; archeologist races Nazis for occult artefacts; rebels wage war with an evil empire in a galaxy far, far away) and injected them with so much cash and sheer invention that small European quickies were unable to compete.

Detail from the poster for 'Warbus', a film by Ferdinando Baldi

Baldi valiantly moved on to war films, and in 1985 travelled to the Philippines to shoot a low-budget Vietnam War action flick, Warbus, for which he hoped there would be an audience on the burgeoning home video market. The movie in the can, Baldi flew to the Cannes Film Festival and joined the throngs of unknown filmmakers who, while their more celebrated counterparts walk the red carpets of the Croisette, hustle to sell their latest picture to hungry distributors in the marketplace of the Cannes convention centre.

Not many people attended the daytime screenings Baldi set up for potential buyers. Among the sparse crowd was a group of Asian men, who later introduced themselves to Baldi as representatives of the Korea Motion Picture Promotion Corporation. The Corporation was looking to fund an action film, they told Baldi, shot in Korea but in the English language and aimed at making money in the American market. Would he be interested in writing and directing a picture for them?

Baldi, of course, was always interested. What really caught his attention, though, was when the Asian men told him the film would not be shot in South Korea - but in the North.

Unbeknownst to Baldi, North Korea had been trying to jumpstart its film industry for the past two decades, ever since Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung’s young, ruthless son, Kim Jong-il, had taken over the state-run Propaganda Film Studios in 1968. Still little known to his own people, and widely underestimated by the international community, the younger Kim was a film buff, with ambitions to create a national film industry that could compete with those in neighbouring China and Japan.

Kim Jong-il wanted to make movies that echoed his favourite Hollywood films: Friday the 13th, Rambo, and James Bond

Kim had gone so far as to kidnap a leading South Korean filmmaker and actress, imprisoning them for eight years and forcing them to make films for him; but in March 1986 they had escaped while on a business trip in Vienna and, humiliatingly, won asylum in the United States, where their tales of working for Kim made headlines for weeks. (Baldi, amazingly, never heard of those very recent events, and no one at the Italian embassy told him - had they, it’s likely none of what follows would have happened.)

Kim Jong-il had big dreams, a committed work ethic, and absolutely no taste. One of the films he forced the South Koreans to make, Pulgasari, was a socialist-themed Godzilla rip-off so bad it’s still famous on the underground circuit (catch it in full on YouTube). He didn’t want to spend much money but he expected to make a tidy profit –tyrannical dictatorships have hefty overheads – and he wanted to make movies that, while following the DPRK’s strict propagandistic guidelines, would still have echoes of his own favourite Hollywood films: Friday the 13th, Rambo, and James Bond.

A still from the North Korean monster movie 'Pulgasari' (1985)Credit:
AP Photo/Raging Thunder

The kidnapping approach having backfired, Kim gave his men orders to find him a new pet foreign filmmaker, this time using more legitimate methods. Fernandino Baldi was the first man who fit the bill.

Early on things looked promising. The Korea Corporation arranged a co-finance agreement with Amerinda, a big Italian company, to fund the film. Baldi quickly came up with a script set during the Second World War, about American commandos involved in the battle of Ten Zan in Japan. Both the North Koreans and Amerinda approved the script outline and so, in 1988, Baldi flew to North Korea, to embark on what he thought would be another quick East Asian adventure before he returned to the comforts and pleasures of cinecittà. When his rickety Soviet aeroplane landed in Pyongyang, Baldi entered a world more absurd than anything he had ever dreamed up in fiction.

Like all foreign visitors to North Korea, Baldi was assigned a pair of guides, who would follow him everywhere he went, organise his schedule, and watch him - as well as each other - for any signs of devious or subversive activity.

The 61-year-old direttore had high hopes that he would be able to finish the script and roll film within days. Instead, the project stalled immediately, as he was told that “someone” had “made some calls” and decided the script had to be rewritten, by the North Koreans themselves. For a month Baldi cooled his heels, constantly supervised, while his script was dismantled following the instructions of an unseen executive producer, almost certainly Kim Jong-il himself.

Ferdinando Baldi, Kim Jong-il's chosen director

In the end the screenplay was a nonsensical mess. The title, Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission, remained, even though the action no longer took place at Ten Zan or had anything to do with it. In the final film’s absurd plot, set in an unspecified Asian country, square-jawed Caucasian men, of unspecified origin but speaking English, are hired by a Lithuanian professor who dabbles in eugenics to put a stop to a gang of mercenaries who are kidnapping women whose “youthful DNA” they are using to create a master race. (The men “extract” the DNA very scientifically: by slashing the women’s throats and “distilling” what comes out.)

In a bizarre twist it turns out the Lithuanian professor is actually also the bad guy, and that he is hiring the heroes to attack and destroy his own criminal operation, for no apparent reason. The movies’ good guys, insensitively, call their mission “the Final Solution.”

Baldi and the handful of Italian colleagues he had been permitted to bring along were housed in the Koryo Hotel, a 45-storey twin-tower structure on an island in the centre of Pyongyang's Taedong river. Their “guides” picked them up in the morning and returned them to the hotel at night. At curfew the bridges off the islands were closed. The Italians ate all their meals in the hotel. Very few locals would speak to them, and when they did the culture was so prudish and reserved the Italians shook their heads in disbelief.

Baldi was in the bizarre situation of making a picture in a country he wasn’t permitted to walk freely in: indeed the North Koreans worked hard to ensure he was kept as much in the dark as possible. He was not allowed to scout locations before filming, seeing them all for the first and only time on the day he was shooting in them. Many mornings the Army would screech up to the location in their trucks and jeeps, tell them filming there was suddenly “impossible". For this reason, huge chunks of the movie are set and shot in the Koryo Hotel itself and other locations around Pyongyang, even though the action is meant to take place in the wild jungle.

The opening titles of Fernando Baldi's 'Ten Zan'

On the crew, only Baldi’s youthful North Korean assistant spoke English. The actors were almost all assigned to the film without Baldi’s input. One of the few he cast himself, the American Frank Zagarino, was judged by the North Koreans to take too many photographs and was thrown in jail for several days on espionage charges. The film’s Lithuanian professor was played not by a professional actor but by former American soldier Charles Jenkins, who in 1965 had defected to North Korea while assigned to the DMZ and been imprisoned there by Kim il-Sung ever since.

The shoot lasted two months. Baldi made do. The crews were unprofessional, lazy and slow - but friendly. He was not allowed to see any of the footage after he had been shot until he was back in Italy, editing. Kim Jong-il visited the set on several occasions, unannounced, to give the Korean crew pep talks. To the Italians he only nodded and smiled, repeating “Hello, hello.” Baldi found him charming and “very kind.”

When every scene had been shot Baldi went back to Rome, put together a cut, and sent it to the Koreans for review. The cast and crew screening was held. And then, just like that, he never heard from them again. Amerinda dropped out of what increasingly seemed like a harebrained investment. Baldi turned his attention to hustling for the next gig, and forgot about the Asian film. Ten Zan was never released in Italy, and it’s unclear whether Baldi himself ever saw its final cut. It was to be the last film he ever made.

Ten Zan: The Ultimate Mission was the last in a steady string of flops, and Baldi died in 2007, aged 80, after 20 years of forced unemployment. Kim Jong-il took longer to give up on his own cinematic ambitions. As late as 2000 his filmmakers, on direct orders, made a homegrown rip-off of Titanic, Souls Protest, that he hoped would scale similar box-office heights but which, predictably, was laughed off the screen by both critics and its (very limited) audience. In 1994, when his father Kim il-Sung died, he officially became the DPRK’s new leader.

"A Kim Jong-il Production: The Unbelievable True Story of North Korea and the Most Audacious Kidnapping in History” by Paul Fischer is published by Viking Books at £14.99